The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy
Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts. New York: Basic Books, 2015. 305 pp. Index. Notes. Illus. $29.99.
Reviewed by Mark D. Mandeles
In The Last Warrior, Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts provide an intellectual history of Andrew W. Marshall, the legendary national-security analyst who, from his position as the Defense Department’s Director of Net Assessment, reported directly to every defense secretary beginning with James Schlesinger in 1973. The Last Warrior examines the problems Marshall addressed as he matured, attended college, developed analytical approaches to diagnose ambiguous situations and phenomena, and honed a framework for national-security analysis at RAND, the National Security Council, and the Office of Net Assessment (ONA).
Krepinevich and Watts assert that Marshall is “one of America’s most influential and enduring strategic thinkers.” They disclose they are not “disinterested observers” of Marshall’s accomplishments in a career that spanned more than 60 years; they each wrote seminal studies as military officers on Marshall’s staff and continued to conduct analyses for ONA after they retired from active military service. The authors are members of “St. Andrew’s Prep,” a group of trusted former ONA staff who deeply respect and appreciate Marshall. This reviewer shares their admiration, and the authors praised research he conducted with Thomas C. Hone and Norman Friedman for ONA. This admission aside, The Last Warrior contains abundant evidence for the authors’ laudatory assessment.
The book speaks to many audiences, including people seeking insight into how a net-assessment program informs senior officials of emerging challenges and opportunities, and historians interested in understanding the role of knowledge and analysis in post–World War II national-security policy. For the first group, the authors show that the logic and procedures of the net-assessment research program emerged from conceptual and practical problems Marshall and his colleagues faced in describing and diagnosing security challenges. At RAND, Marshall began to view the U.S.-Soviet rivalry as a long-term competition to gain advantage through a series of moves and counter-moves. Central to this analysis was Marshall’s effort to develop effective comparative measures of military power. In his 1966 paper “Problems of Estimating Military Power,” he focused on obstacles to evaluating military forces of adversary nations or coalitions, observing that numbers of personnel under arms, weapons of various types, and major formations have long been metrics used to compare and rank military power. Krepinevich and Watts note the importance of Marshall’s insight that such measures do not explain combat outcomes. Military history includes many accounts of numerically inferior forces defeating their adversaries, when elements of logistics, geography, unsuitable doctrine, poor planning, inattention to feedback, or human error overwhelm numerical advantage.
“Problems in Estimating Military Power” informed tenets of Marshall’s maturing conception of how to organize research to inform national-security policy; useful analysis involved asking the right questions even if finding answers required new research and insights; questioning assumptions about how particular factors affect outcomes; building knowledge about human nature, individual and organizational behavior, and societies; and emphasizing diagnosis for senior leaders while eschewing recommendations. Marshall demonstrated the practical value of this approach in his critique of the CIA’s estimate of the Soviet economy’s size (relative to the United States’) and of its military budget. Considerably more accurate estimates were generated using the tools and approach of net assessment.
For historians, Krepinevich and Watts summarize declassified research, including Proud Prophet, an exercise that precipitated a reevaluation of U.S. strategic nuclear doctrine. Marshall was primarily responsible for ideas that structured this exercise, which led to the elimination of components of U.S. planning, including launch on warning, conventional horizontal escalation, the early use of nuclear weapons, and tit-for-tat nuclear exchanges.
The authors’ description of Proud Prophet is fascinating. Spanning two weeks in June 1983, the game’s scenario involved a year-long mobilization of NATO and Warsaw Pact forces, followed by a conflict in the Middle East that spread to Europe, which involved Soviet nuclear strikes in Europe and NATO nuclear strikes in response. The exercise ended in a massive nuclear exchange and the execution of the U.S. Single Integrated Operational Plan, also known as the SIOP.
The game showed that by following doctrine, the United States and the Soviet Union could commit nuclear suicide despite senior leaders’ aversion to that outcome. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Vessey participated in the exercise and deliberately executed U.S. military strategy. No previous defense secretary had been willing to test U.S. nuclear strategy in a war game. As the Soviets countered each U.S. escalation, Weinberger turned to Vessey and said, “Our strategy is bankrupt.”
Krepinevich and Watts argue that the net-assessment research program is a useful way to think about diverse topics such as the “revolution in warfare that arrived with the advent of precision-guided munitions and battle networks, the rise of China, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons.” They offer ample evidence to demonstrate that over the years, ONA has provided U.S. senior leaders with early warning of emerging strategic problems and insight into opportunities to pursue strategic advantages—when senior leaders devoted time and attention to interacting with ONA. To discerning readers, The Last Warrior shows that ONA’s efforts have influenced ideas about what a satisfactory diagnosis of complex national-security problems ought to be.
The Last Warrior is an excellent introduction to Andrew W. Marshall, his work, and ONA’s role in U.S. national-security policymaking. Krepinevich and Watts add to the depth of the account by noting their own considerable contributions to ONA’s later output. Yet they only surveyed a fraction of ONA’s work; it remains for other scholars to describe and assess the rest of ONA’s classified and unclassified output.
Hell From the Heavens: The Epic Story of the USS Laffey and World War II’s Greatest Kamikaze Attack
John Wukovits. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2015. 320 pp. Append. Index. Illus. Biblio. Maps. Notes. $25.99.
Reviewed by Captain Gerard D. Roncolato, U.S. Navy (Retired)
Although warfare has radically changed since World War II, lessons learned from the conflict are still relevant. These stories need to be told, lest we forget what war at sea against a capable opponent entails, especially the immense demands placed on ship crews. John Wukovits’ Hell from the Heavens is first a human-interest story about the crew of the USS Laffey (DD-724), an Allen M. Sumner–class destroyer that was furiously attacked by kamikazes during the 1945 battle for Okinawa. It describes commissioning a new ship; forging a capable crew out of raw recruits; and training fiercely for the hardest naval combat of the war, countering the kamikaze tactics that began during the 1944 Philippines Campaign. It also follows Commander F. Julian Becton, a combat-experienced skipper, trying to convey to his crew the intensity and sudden violence of the war they were about to join, a sense of what was to come, and how that crew bonded together to survive an incredible attack and bring their ship home. Finally, it is a story of major-power war, at both the personal and doctrinal levels.
Wukovits does an admirable job balancing the crew’s experiences with historic events, strategic and tactical considerations, and enemy perspectives, which are too often absent in our World War II libraries. He is not a naval professional, and his dialogue sometimes slips, but these errors are few and far between and do not detract from the book’s broader message. Wukovits spends a good deal of time covering the Laffey’s workup process in a refreshing look at wartime construction and training. Becton was a veteran of the savage fighting around Guadalcanal early in the war. He had witnessed the loss of the first Laffey (DD-459), and as the CO of the Aaron Ward (DD-483) had a ship sunk from under him during the Solomon Islands Campaign. At the most desperate point in the Laffey’s struggle off Okinawa, he harkened back to those days, telling his sailors, “I’ll never abandon ship as long as a gun will fire.”
The 16 April 1945 attack on the Laffey lasted an hour and 20 minutes. Twenty-two planes attacked the destroyer; 12 were shot down by the Laffey, 6 others crashed into her, and 5 bombs hit or were near misses. Incredibly, despite this pounding the ship stayed afloat. The story of how the Laffey survived is the meat of Wukovits’ narrative. The factors that contributed to her success include the superb training of her crew, their brute determination, and their ability to organize into ad hoc teams as the established shipboard organization dissolved under the onslaught. Eventually, the Laffey was brought home for repairs. But, like so many of the ships damaged at Okinawa, her participation in the war was over.
The lessons of the Laffey’s survival are critical to today’s Navy. First, as Wukovits points out, war at sea is fundamentally different than war from the sea. The ship’s gunfire support at Normandy was highly effective, but impersonal. Seeing the eyes of a kamikaze pilot as he crashed into the ship made war wholly more personal. Second, training for the chaos of combat when established routines, organization, and communications fail is critical. Ships must be designed and crews must be prepared to fight through such chaos, which requires realistic and thorough engineering and training in peacetime. Third, major-power war is usually long and invariably brutal. Fourth, we invaded Okinawa without air and sea supremacy—picket destroyers, carriers, and many other ships paid a heavy but necessary price. Fifth, there will be losses—perhaps heavy—that must be overcome. This leads to one final lesson: The survival of ships and sailors is often contingent on a close-by ability to render assistance and then to effect major repairs in theater. The Okinawa picket stations had plenty of support, from the accompanying small amphibious escorts (known fittingly as “pallbearers”) and numerous tugs in the vicinity to the significant on-scene repair capability at Ie Shima and Buckner Bay near Okinawa. Those capabilities were in the tactical arena and subjected to frequent air, subsurface, and even suicide surface attack. That commanders chose to keep them so close testifies to their urgent need.
Given the renewed prospects for major combat at sea, today’s naval leaders must consider what confronted naval leaders then: how to prepare the U.S. Navy for such a struggle. How will it be sustained? How will losses be recouped? How will damages be speedily repaired and ships sent back into action? These questions are as relevant today as they were in April 1945.
When Books Went To War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II
Molly Guptill Manning. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. 267 pp. Append. Illus. Notes. Index. $25.
Reviewed by Alice A. Booher
Molly Guptill Manning, a New Yorker with an academic base in history and a degree in law, is an attorney at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Previously having written a book and several law-review articles on Arthur Train’s bogus barrister Ephraim Tutt, Manning’s law-journal efforts have also targeted issues relating to ethics, soldier disenfranchisement, and wartime censorship, enquiry into all of which dovetailed into this current work.
The subject matter of When Books Went To War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II is both heady and heavy, embracing two massive topics: the relatively undistilled overall history of World War II and the use of written reading materials in the conduct and art of war. Manning has added a generous window of fascinating glimpses into the passionate culture of librarians and insider details on the idiosyncratic machinations of the publishing industry.
The author prepares a historical foundation by outlining the appalling banning and burning of books in prewar Europe from 1933 onward, first in Germany and then elsewhere, an eventual estimated 100 million volumes—a true “bibliocaust.” Concurrent with escalating involvement in the conflict, the American response was to donate hardback books from the civilian population (including via the American Library Association and then the Victory Book Campaign), a well-intentioned concept that generated inherent problems of its own but nonetheless contributed some 18 million books.
Thereafter, publishers were persuaded to develop and donate lightweight, inexpensive paperbacks, using different ink, thinner paper, and new presses to produce masses of books in two sizes, the smaller one to fit in a soldier’s breast pocket and the other in his back pants pocket. The eventual tally reached an extraordinary 123 million volumes via the Council on Books in Wartime, whose slogan was “books are weapons in the war of ideas.”
The selection of “suitable” books to be included in the actual delivery effort was predictably not without controversy—popular authors are not known for towing a clear-cut politically correct line. With a few fits and starts, the ultimate choices included something for nearly everyone. World War II soldiers and sailors, like many before and since, spent a lot of time “waiting” for something to happen. This bored but apprehensive nescient readership benefited from the escape, hope, solace, and simple raw enlightenment provided by the plentiful, easily toted, and readable books. Reported images of wounded soldiers reading a stained and tattered paperback book pulled from their pocket while waiting for treatment are both haunting and somehow uplifting. Authors stateside received personal letters from service personnel who thanked them for the peace and comfort of a renewed hometown familiarity; a few authors found their earlier works to be virtually reborn by the project. Soldiers shared their “troop-friendly” libraries with one another and for some who had not been keen on the idea, reading became an “irresistible pleasure.”
It is a remarkable story not often discussed in texts or courses. Manning has systemically documented the relatively unfiltered raw data for teaching the story and defining the potential lessons learned, but often stops short of in-depth critical scrutiny and analyses. Exhaustively researched, if the book suffers from any encumbrance it is an overabundance of raw information. Readers will appreciate two generous appendices, which provide comprehensive lists of banned authors and the “portable, accessible, and pervasive” paperback publications that constituted the Armed Service Editions. Manning does opine that the postwar GI Bill, established so that veterans might obtain an education without regard to wealth or class, went hand in hand with the democratization of books during the war thanks to the “paperback revolution.” This seems a judicious conclusion as books had indeed “done battle” with a remarkable impact.